In a world full of distractions, achieving focus and “flow” can feel impossible. In this post, we explore flow’s power for creativity and productivity, and the common obstacles, like multitasking, that block it.
“Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.”
Alexander Graham Bell, Scottish-Canadian inventor and scientist
Can you recall the last time you had a full day free from constant distractions, digital or otherwise? You may feel like a pinball bouncing between the requests of your colleagues and family and tasks like responding to emails and text messages and managing home repair. If you’re like me, then you can’t imagine an entire waking hour without one of these interruptions. Even now, as I sit here writing, I have a cat sitting directly in front of me, between my face and the keyboard!
While not everything we do requires total concentration, many activities do, and finding the time and bandwidth to focus deeply on anything for a significant amount of time feels more challenging every day. Whether reading, writing, creating art, developing software, or practicing martial arts, reaching and sustaining your flow state when needed can be extremely challenging. In part one of this blog post, we’ll discuss the definition and characteristics of flow, who discovered it and a few common factors that can stifle or interrupt it. We’ll also look at some research behind our shrinking attention spans.
What is Flow and Why Does it Matter?
Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (pronounced me-high, cheek-sent-me-high-ee), one of the co-founders of positive psychology and a prominent happiness researcher, coined the term “flow” in 1970. After years of study and research, he concluded that happiness is an internal state of being, not an external one. The premise of Csíkszentmihályi’s book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, is that people can improve their happiness levels by introducing flow, the mental state a person must reach to achieve complete absorption in a task. Csíkszentmihályi argued that happiness is not a rigid, unchanging state but manifests through a committed effort. Beyond each person’s set point of happiness, there is another happiness level in which each individual has some degree of control. Through his research, Csíkszentmihályi began to understand that people are most creative, productive and happy while in a flow state.
After surveying professionals from various fields, from artists to athletes to academics, Csíkszentmihályi discovered they all reached the flow state. Sometimes known as “being in the zone,” everyone achieved complete immersion in the process of their activity and lost all sense of time. In addition, Csíkszentmihályi discovered while studying the artists, in particular, that most were generally unmotivated by validation or money but made art to experience the creative process. Flow is about finding the perfect balance of skill and challenge and requires a high concentration level. Specific criteria for flow include clarity of goals and reward at the top of mind, immediate feedback on the task, and a balance between the task’s challenge and the person’s abilities. The characteristics of flow include:
- The sensation of an intrinsically rewarding experience.
- The feeling of time speeding up or slowing down.
- A sense that actions and awareness merge without conscious rumination.
- Total control over the task that is performed with effortless ease.
What’s Impeding Your Flow?
Several measurable factors hijack our attention spans. Let’s look at a few of the more ubiquitous causes of our reduced focus, starting with where we work. Most modern workplaces (including the home office, as many of us learned over the pandemic) aren’t designed to encourage flow. How our workspace is arranged plays a critical role in our productivity and emotional well-being. Choices about colors, lighting, furniture and noise levels all impact how we think, feel and work. Proxemics, the study of human dynamics related to space, dramatically affects our ability to focus deeply. Supposedly, the whole concept behind the open-plan office was so that colleagues could collaborate, but most of us know what a terrible idea that is in reality.
Other reasons you may struggle to reach flow at work include dysfunctional policies and processes in your daily professional life. For example, some workers don’t have clearly defined objectives and goals. Unlike an Olympic swimmer whose only goal is to swim the required distance faster than their competitors, many employees don’t begin their workday with one clear set of objectives. This situation may be due to poor leadership, ineffective communication or lack of team cohesion. Sometimes, your skills, knowledge and experience aren’t well matched to the job’s challenges, or there aren’t any opportunities to learn and grow outside your comfort zone, and you’re confused, or worse—bored. You may also experience a lack of control over when and how you work if the rhythm of your day is dictated by others, leaving you always on the verge of disruption.
“A study by Professor Michael Posner at the University of Oregon found that if you are focusing on something and you get interrupted, on average, it will take twenty-three minutes for you to get back to the same state of focus. A different study of office workers in the U.S. found most of them never get an hour of uninterrupted work in a typical day,” says Johann Hari, author of Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—And How to Think Deeply Again. “If this goes on for months and years, it scrambles your ability to figure out who you are and what you want. You become lost in your own life.”
Another impediment is an increase in switching, otherwise known as multitasking. According to Kevin P. Madore, Ph.D. and Anthony D. Wagner, Ph.D., authors of the scientific article Multicosts of Multitasking, “multitasking means trying to perform two or more tasks concurrently, which typically leads to repeatedly switching between tasks (i.e., task switching) or leaving one task unfinished in order to do another.”
Multitasking is often a misnomer because, as research has shown, the human brain cannot perform multiple tasks simultaneously. In the mid-1990s, psychologists Robert Rogers, Ph.D., and Stephen Monsell, Ph.D., conducted experiments to determine the “switch-cost” effect that occurs when people attempt to multitask. They found that even when people had to switch entirely “predictably between two tasks every two or four trials, they were still slower on task-switch than on task-repeat trials.” Dr. Rogers and Dr. Monsell also discovered that “increasing the time available between trials for preparation reduced but did not eliminate the cost of switching.” They concluded that there are two components of the switch-cost effect—one “attributable to the time taken to adjust the mental control settings (which can be achieved in advance time-permitting) and another due to the carry-over of the control settings from the previous trial (apparently immune to preparation).” This mental juggling hampers our productivity by reducing cognition, comprehension, attention and overall performance. It can be perilous for those whose jobs require a high level of focus, like air traffic controllers, first responders or healthcare workers.
Writing part one of this blog post was in itself an exercise in avoiding distractions long enough for me to get into the flow state necessary to research, extrapolate and synthesize some of the most pertinent information for you. Thank goodness for noise-canceling earbuds and catnip!* Stay tuned for part two, where we’ll investigate some theories and research about our reduced attention spans, the benefits of achieving flow at work and in our personal lives, and ways to regain focus and return to a state where all the meaningful work happens!
*No kitties were harmed while making this blog post. They will disagree, but it’s true.
Anne Evenson is a native Austinite and a proud Veteran’s spouse with over 20 years of marketing, communications and program coordination experience in the public, private and nonprofit sectors. She is also a sculptor, jeweler and all-around dabbler in the arts and loves to help military-connected individuals discover their inner creativity.
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